CSV to TSV Converter

What this tool is used for

• Producing a tab-separated file for a tool that cannot parse quoted CSV.
• Pasting tabular data into a spreadsheet where tabs split columns cleanly.
• Converting a file whose values contain commas, so tabs avoid the quoting entirely.
• Preparing data for a command-line tool that defaults to tab separation.
• Normalising a mixed set of exports to one delimiter.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why convert to TSV at all?

Because a tab almost never appears inside real data, while commas appear constantly. TSV pastes straight into Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers without a delimiter dialogue, and the file cannot break just because someone typed "Smith, John".

What happens to a tab inside a value?

It is replaced with a space, along with any embedded newline or carriage return. TSV as commonly used has *no* escaping mechanism at all — that is the trade for its simplicity — so an embedded tab would silently create an extra column.

Are the CSV quotes removed?

Yes. RFC 4180 quoting exists to protect commas, quotes and newlines inside a field; once the delimiter is a tab, `"Smith, John"` becomes `Smith, John` with no quotes. Doubled quotes (`""`) are unescaped back to one.

Which does Excel actually prefer?

TSV, in practice. Excel's CSV import follows your operating system's list separator, so the same file opens correctly in the US and lands in one column in most of Europe, where the separator is a semicolon. A tab is a tab everywhere.

Is TSV a real standard?

There is an IANA registration for `text/tab-separated-values`, and it says fields may not contain tabs or newlines — no escape sequence is defined. So TSV is standardised precisely by forbidding the problem rather than solving it.

Is there a way to escape a tab inside a TSV field?

Not in the plain format — that is TSV's real weakness. The IANA-registered variant escapes them as `\t`, but most tools do not implement it, so a value containing a tab has to be cleaned rather than escaped.

Common errors and gotchas

• Overlooking values that already contain tabs, which then split into extra columns.
• Assuming TSV needs no quoting. It needs less, but embedded tabs and newlines still break it.
• Losing the distinction between an empty field and a quoted empty string.
• Ignoring embedded newlines inside quoted CSV fields, which a naive converter turns into new rows.
• Expecting a spreadsheet to keep long numeric strings as text after the conversion.